A low-budget film set in Kashmir has been picking up plaudits at international film festivals, bringing a different focus to the troubled Himalayan region.

“Valley of Saints,” the first feature from U.S. director and screenwriter Musa Syeed, won the World Cinema Audience Award for dramatic feature at the Sundance Film Festival over the weekend.

Mr. Syeed, who is currently attending the International Film Festival Rotterdam, says audiences there have put the film among their top-ten favorites from hundreds of features that are showing.

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It’s a big success for a film that was made by a crew of three people – Mr. Syeed, a producer and cinematographer – on a shoestring and with non-professional Kashmiri actors playing the main roles.

Valley of Saints

The film is mainly in the Kashmiri language, with smatterings of English, and was filmed in the Valley in 2010, during a brutal Indian security crackdown that killed more than 100 stone-wielding Kashmiri separatist protesters, many of them teenagers.

Mr. Syeed’s film is part love story, part tale of environmental degradation set on Dal Lake, the still-beautiful centerpiece of Kashmir’s tourism industry.

The violence and curfews of everyday life form a backdrop to the action. But unlike other recent works that have raised awareness of Kashmir’s political situation – most notably Basharat Peer’s celebrated memoir “Curfewed Night” – the troubles here are in softer focus.

“I think what’s important for people to understand is what it’s like to live there,” Mr. Syeed said. “When I was growing up all I saw was the violence. What I wanted to show is that despite the destruction there’s still beauty there.”

Mr. Syeed, a 27-year-old who was born in Indiana and lives in Queens, New York, is ethnically Kashmiri. His father, an early separatist, was a political prisoner in Kashmir in the 1960s and his parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s.

His father spoke little about his political past when Mr. Syeed was growing up and the family visited only once when he was a child, in 1988, on the cusp of a major insurrection against Indian rule that was to last through the 1990s and 2000s, kill tens of thousands of people, and is only now petering out.

Mr. Syeed started his career making documentaries about generational differences among immigrant communities in the U.S. He then turned to Kashmir, partly as a way of exploring his roots.

Initially, Mr. Syeed planned to bring a larger crew from the U.S. to make a film largely about Kashmir’s environmental situation. But the eruption of anti-Indian violence in the summer of 2010 forced him to change plans, scaling back to a skeleton crew of three, although they hired a few more people locally.

Daniel Ziv

Gulzar Ahmad Bhat paddles a traveler across Dal Lake in January.

Mr. Syeed whittled a 100-page script down to only three pages, and refocused on the love story and the violence.

“I felt we should still go and make the film. I really felt an urgency to tell the story at that point,” he said.

The team knew each other from earlier documentaries and used these skills to act nimbly, at one point even capturing some of the violence as a backdrop to their story.

“We tried not to get into the midst of the protests,” Mr. Syeed said. Despite this approach, “we did get hassled at times” by Indian security forces, he added.

Mr. Syeed relied more on natural lighting than set pieces, which gives the film a naturalistic shine. He hired non-actors to play the lead parts, eager to avoid over-wrought emotion which is often the standard among Indian television and film actors.

Prepping for the film in the summer of 2009, Mr. Syeed made a trip to Kashmir and met a man his own age who for the past 15 years had been ferrying tourists on Dal Lake in a traditional “Shikara” wooden boat.

He asked the man, Gulzar Ahmad Bhat, to play the lead in his film, a boat driver who falls in love with a pretty environmental scientist.

“I worked very hard for the film,” said Mr. Bhat, whose favorite actor is Bollywood star Hrithik Roshan. He learned on the job, with little time to study acting. “It’s unbelievable for me,” he added. “Everything is possible for everyone.”

Mr. Bhat had no passport and was unable to secure one from local authorities in time to attend the Sundance award ceremony.

Getting a female actor was a tougher task. Kashmir is in many ways a conservative society and many families did not want their daughters to appear in film, especially amid the troubles, Mr. Syeed said.

Daniel Ziv

Pictured, Gulzar Ahmad Bhat.

Luckily, an acquaintance with a curfew pass was able to round up a few local actresses and bring them to a park near Dal Lake. Neelofar Hamid, a local television actress, had an easygoing style which fit the film perfectly, Mr. Syeed said.

Mr. Syeed is now talking to international distributors in the hope of winning the film a wide release. On a personal level, the film, he says, has allowed him to get to know a land he barely visited while growing up.

“As I became an adult I was curious to find my place in the world,” he said. “Making the film was really a point of reconnection for me.”

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